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Bold Fusion

Adam Grant once conducted a study in which different signs were placed at two hand-washing stations.

One sign read: Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases. The other read: Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases.

Doctors and nurses who used the second station used 45 percent more soap, Grant found.

Itís these kinds of studies, and the resulting insights, that have made Grant a phenomenon in management and organizational psychology. He was the focus of a New York Times Magazine cover story in March and has worked with companies and organizations including Google, Facebook, Apple and the National Football League.

The Wharton School of Business professor recently published the best-selling ďGive and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success.Ē The book focuses on why some people rise to the top in organizations, while others sink, and breaks people into three categories: givers, takers and matchers.

Takers are trying to get as much as they can without giving; givers contribute more to others than they receive; and matchers maintain a balance between giving and taking. Ironically, Grant found givers tend to rise or fall in an organization, based on their ability to give while still producing outstanding results. That creates a challenge for managers, he wrote in the Harvard Business Review: How do you encourage giving without making people doormats?

On Thursday, Grant will discuss his book at Bold Fusion, a summit for young professionals that is produced by HYPE and the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber. Grant worked at Letís Go Publications while doing undergraduate work at Harvard University. He then earned a Ph.D. in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan.

Grant recently talked to The Enquirer about his work.

TELL ME a little bit about your book and why you wrote it.

When we think about what makes people successful, we tend to think about individual factors like hard work, talent and luck. Those things all matter, but I was really struck by the fact that we live and work in a connected world, so when you look at colleagues and customers and bosses and other stakeholders, interactions with other people are possibly the biggest parts of our jobs.

So I was curious about whether there are consistent styles of interaction that are effective across industries and cultures, and it turns out there are three styles that are pretty fundamental: taker, giver and matcher.

HOW LONG did it take you to research the book, and why did you go back to school to study organizational psychology?

It was about 10 years of research. There are a lot of things that pointed me in this direction. Iíve always been fascinated with psychology and peopleís experiences, and when I was working in my first real job, I was doing advertising and I was leading the advertising team.

I noticed that I didnít love the parts of the job that involved things like doing a budget. What I really got excited about was thinking about how can I hire a better staff? How can I be a more effective leader? How can I motivate my team? And I walked away from my experience thinking about how do I take those aspects of my job that are part of what I do, and make them my full-time job.

It was a tremendous opportunity to apply psychology to work and figure out how to improve the quality of peopleís work lives.

ITíS SAID the Millennial Generation is particularly focused on giving and that they evaluate job opportunities based on how engaged the employer is in the community. Are you seeing that in your research?

On the one hand we see a lot of that anecdotally: The interest in working for a socially responsible employer, the desire to give back and do something more socially entrepreneurial, environmentally responsible. On the other hand, there is this really thought-provoking body of research by Jean Twenge and her colleagues which essentially shows that Millennials have the same work values as every other generation, and they fundamentally want the same things out of work but maybe have slightly different ideas about how to get them.

So in general I think Iíve become pretty convinced that generation is a pretty poor predictor of what people are looking for on the job.

YOUíVE WORKED with a wide range of companies and organizations. What kinds of things do you do for them?

It varies a lot from one company to another. In some of these organizations, theyíre working on how to foster a culture where employees are willing to help each other out, share knowledge, provide mentoring, make introductions. In other cases, itís the strategy for redesigning jobs to make them more meaningful and motivating, or even to give employees the latitude to take the initiative to redesign their own jobs.

I tend to turn down most of those engagements because I feel like a lot of times consultants are better trained to do that kind of work. I go in when a company wants to implement something thatís directly related to my research and expertise.

ARE THERE other things you eventually want to do?

I have my hands full at the moment! Sometimes this job feels like being a kid in a candy store, only the candy storeís the size of a large city. My goal is to generate and share knowledge that improves peopleís lives at work, and I think there are lots of different ways to do that. I really enjoy the research, teaching, writing, speaking and consulting. Itís hard to imagine anything else. ⬛